Existential Reverberations in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Abstract

The paper seeks to read Samuel Becket’s famous tragi-comic play Waiting for Godot in its broad socio-historical and philosophical background of its time and argues it to be a perfect specimen of an existentialist play projecting the angst, disorientations and boredom of the time. The play, through a nuanced portrayal two tramps, acutely shows how the theme of waiting is not only negative, the bleak aspects of life, but also brings about a range of human emotions that actually make life bearable. While the negative interpretation of the tramps situation fall in line with usual reception of Beckett as a pessimist, a positive reading of the play shows how it is  inflected with deep philosophical and metaphysical questions that have remained  the basis of human of existence since the beginning of human civilization.